Live updates: Beijing Olympics begin

15:40 nm We passed a man in the hazmat suit while holding a fishing net along the airport road, and that was the only inexplicable note. The Beijing Olympics are the Genocide Games, the second pandemic Games, the first second Games of a Chinese century, and the most closed Olympic Games in history. It makes sense, it all. All this can be explained.

There has never been an Olympics so captivating. Omicron is the toughest test for China’s zero-COVID philosophy, and after two years of reporting, almost no fallen neighborhoods in Beijing have been re-locked in the brutalist Chinese way, with residents banned from leaving their homes. Beijing’s capital airport, one of the busiest in the world, is a haunted airport that handles semi-empty flights of travelers associated with Games: International Olympic Committee’s internal broadcasting teams, the smaller than usual army of NBC employees, officials and judges, the athletes of countries that could not afford to rent their own plane, and the colorful general media, who all take pictures of the airport staff in hazmat suits. No other planes seem to land except this one.

The daily COVID tests are enthusiastic – the daily throat swab lets just about everyone go. Journalists as well as athletes use VPNs on their surf phones or laptops to evade the Great Firewall, and hacking by Chinese security services is accepted. When Canadian government officials are informed about visits to China, they are told, among other things, that if you log in to any account on a Chinese wireless system here, the Chinese government will have access to that account forever.

The Star’s Bruce Arthur has the story.

14:15 What is it like to be a Canadian athlete in Beijing’s Olympic Village during a pandemic?

Ahead of the Games starting Friday, the team of Canadian biathlete Adam Runnalls is capturing his unique experience on TikTok – and sharing a look at everything from PCR testing to smart beds – and getting tens of thousands of views.

When he arrived in Beijing on Sunday, Runnalls walked into a campus-style residence in Zhangjiakou village, located in the northern part of China.

Read the rest from the Star’s Lebanese Osman.

14:06 Long before some of the world’s best athletes would march to Bird’s Nest Stadium on Friday to witness the lighting of the torch, there were calls to extinguish this Winter Olympics with preventative eradication.

There were demands to boycott the Games so that China’s ever-encouraged authoritarian regime would not benefit from them – an outcome that, if the history lesson of the West’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games taught us anything, punishes athletes and changes almost nothing. not. And then there was the Green Party’s big idea, raised a little over a year ago, to move the Games to Vancouver – a hypothetical fantasy that elicited laughter from a man named John Furlong, who once hosted an Olympics in that city, and what made it clear that such an effort would require years of meticulous lead time, not difficult months.

So here we are, on the eve of a Chinese Winter Games, and the question outside the playing field is a dull question: to know what we know about China’s blatant disregard for human rights, not to mention the surveillance state- trends that several countries recommend their athletes and officials arrive here with surfers and laptops, is it possible to watch this television spectacle of snow and ice with a clear conscience?

Read the latest from The Star’s Dave Feschuk.

1:12 nm It’s quite a thing to see a 68 – year – old Bavarian lawyer act as a contortionist, but maybe that’s just part of the magic of the Olympics. Thomas Bach is the president of the International Olympic Committee, which is a difficult task. This is a big world. Bringing it together means complications.

The night before the opening of the Beijing Olympics, therefore, Bach did what he so often does when threatened: he tried to retreat into the comforting, imaginary security of neutrality. The Olympics must exist above politics, he said, and instead soar in the soft pale mist of perfect human equilibrium. He said this in 2022 in Beijing, China.

“With this vision, we are all and we should all be equal, regardless of social background, gender, race, sexual orientation or political beliefs,” Bach said at his Games opening news conference. “In the Games, especially in the Olympic Village, there is no discrimination … we can only achieve and we can only achieve this mission to unite everyone in this peaceful competition if the Olympic Games stand above and beyond all the political disputes. . It is also only possible if the Olympic Games and the IOC are politically neutral, and do not become an instrument for achieving political goals. “

Check out the full story of the Star’s Bruce Arthur.